Jonathan D. Teubner and Paul W. Gleason in The Hedgehog Review:
As news of Hamas’s murderous October 7 surprise attack on Israel started to circulate in the global information space, so too did the propaganda. According to one estimate, the Israel-Hamas war sparked the highest volume of global propaganda—emanating not just from Israel, Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries but also from Russia, China, and Iran—that experts had ever seen. Even more so than after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas was springtime for propaganda.
The actual narratives that started to circulate ranged from the outright absurd—Ukraine provided Hamas with weapons—to the misleading, as when a famous Iranian mosque raised a black flag, which some Facebook users took as a declaration of war. News services and experts tried to assure the public that the black flag was more a symbol of mourning, but it was hard to tell how many of the excitable social-media users actually believed them.
More here.